The Cosmic Ocean. Paul K. Chappell

principles of Soviet Communism was optimism, so it’s a form of social control by the way that has been widespread in totalitarian types of societies. But I think it has worked very well in America. Take the issue of class inequality. How could that be a problem if anyone can become rich by thinking about it?32

      When I discuss our amazing human ability to arrive at “accurate answers” for the causes of our problems, I have met people who say, “All truth is relative. We cannot really know what is true and what is untrue, because there is no such thing as truth.” But there is such a thing as truth. For example, it is a scientific fact that African Americans are not subhuman. It is a scientific fact that women are not intellectually inferior to men. And it is a scientific fact that the earth and other planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. Not long ago, people were imprisoned, beaten, and even killed for promoting these truths.

      Many people used to believe the underlying cause of slavery in the United States was that black people were subhuman, and that God had made them to be slaves. But that was an inaccurate answer for the cause of slavery. Frederick Douglass explains how asking “why” as a child, along with his critical thinking ability, eventually led him to a more accurate answer for the cause of slavery:

      [As a child I wondered] why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves and others masters? These were perplexing questions and very troublesome to my childhood. I was very early told by some one that “God up in the sky” had made all things, and had made black people to be slaves and white people to be masters … I could not tell how anybody could know that God made black people to be slaves. Then I found, too, that there were puzzling exceptions to this theory of slavery, in the fact that all black people were not slaves, and all white people were not masters …